Methods of cloud-path selection for offloading in mobile cloud computing systems

Recently, there emerge a variety of clouds in sky and thus, several similar cloud services (from different cloud venders) can be provided to a mobile end device. The goal of cloud-path selection is to find an optimal cloud among a certain class of clouds that provide the same service, in order to carry out the offloaded computation tasks. It is easy to choose the optimal cloud to save execution time incurred by offloading to cloud when considering only one factor. However, there are many criteria such as speed, bandwidth, price, security and availability that need to be considered when making final decisions. In this paper, a multiple criteria decision analysis approach based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) in a fuzzy environment is proposed to decide which cloud is the most suitable one for offloading. The AHP is used to determine the weights of the criteria for cloud-path selection, while fuzzy TOPSIS is to obtain the final ranking of alternative clouds. The numerical analysis is performed to evaluate the model.